serious music theory comment incoming (sorry)

Those funny names are the different modes of major, along with Ionian (aka major) and Aeolian (aka minor). Basically they boil down to: play all the same notes from a given major scale, in the same order, but with a different starting point. You may already know A minor as the relative minor of C major… they both include all the same notes but have very different emotional and musical feelings.

So play C major’s notes and start at D instead and you get D Dorian = D E F G A B C

Play them starting at E and you get E Phrygian = E F G A B C D

and so on and so on

This has wild effects on the “feel” of the music and learning about how they’re used in songwriting opened up a whole new galaxy of musical thought for me. Dorian sounds “cool,” Lydian sounds “spacey,” Locrian “uncomfortable.” Of course this only applies to western music concepts and will depend on the individual listener’s context as well as the context of anything else going on in the composition. But I think it’s fuckin cool and has given me a new appreciation for the magic of music. Took a long time for me to really get it but I do recommend!